Tenor Guitar Gathering poster

The Tenor Guitar Gathering will again bring musicians from around the country to Astoria for a weekend of performances, jam sessions and workshops.

The gathering is a program of the Tenor Guitar Foundation, based in Astoria, and is now in its 14th year.

Aside from holding the annual event, the foundation aims to establish a hall of fame for the tenor guitar — a smaller, four-string relative of the acoustic guitar, developed for tenor banjo players — and educate people about it, primarily through workshops and a youth program.

“We’re the unofficial tenor guitar capital of the world,” foundation president John Halovanic said.

Concert evenings, with four musicians taking up 25 minutes each, take place on Friday and Saturday at the Charlene Larsen Center for Performing Arts.

Though the event is billed as a showcase of the tenor guitar, some performers will also play the mandolin, banjo or violin.

“The performers are able to do whatever it is they want to do, as long as they’re working towards promoting four-string guitar, which is our goal,” said Chris Wessel, a director on the foundation’s board and the performer coordinator.

The musicians will play varied styles. A Portland-based music teacher and new performer this year, Baron Collins-Hill, will open the Friday lineup at 7 p.m., followed by Gerry Carthy, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a unique style of Irish music, and Pat MacSwyney, from Los Angeles, who plays Irish and Balkan music.

The night’s headliner Lowell “Banana” Levinger, from Inverness, California, a founding member of the folk rock group The Youngbloods, known for their 1967 single “Get Together.”

A resident of Reno, Nevada, Wessel, who has been coming to the gathering since 2012, will open the concert evening at 7 p.m. Saturday. His set list will include a medley of songs showcasing the possibilities of the instrument, a few songs paying tribute to Jimmy Buffett and a jazz tune or two.

“Sometimes we make up a set list on the fly, too,” Wessel said. “We get together some of the other performers and see what everybody wants to do and we’ll just kind of make it happen.”

Following Wessel will be the Tenor Guitar Hall of Fame inductee and flat picker Tim May, from Nashville, Tennessee; Grant Flick, of Bowling Green, Ohio; and Tyler Jackson, who is also a banjo player and curator at the American Banjo Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

According to Wessel, Flick is “a real phenom” and Jackson “a magnificent player and one that everybody wants to see.”

At the end of each night, the performers get together and play two songs as a grand finale: “We Shall Overcome” and “Hard Times Come Again, No More” on Friday and “World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” and “Limehouse Blues” on Saturday.

Outside the event, musicians will also jam at the Astoria Sunday Market and across town throughout the weekend, including at the Bridgewater Bistro, Astoria Riverwalk Inn, the Astoria Riverfront Trolley, as well as on KMUN.

Each performer also leads their own workshop before the evening concert (Wessel will conduct a non-theoretical class on the simple chord melody technique.)

Tenor Guitar Gathering

Tenor Guitar Gathering

Performances, jam sessions and workshops throughout Astoria on Friday and Saturday

Tickets, separate for each workshop and concert, are available at the foundation’s website

www.tenorguitar.org